Must-read instant history of the pandemic by @lawrence_wright: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year

The quote that sticks with me is from Matt Pottinger on "the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment.

“The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: they can be “hampered by their own orthodoxies, their own egos, their own narrow approach to the world.”

Pottinger went on, “You need broad-minded leaders who know how to hold people accountable, who know how to delegate, who know a good chain of command, and know how to make hard judgments.”

The great strength of this piece is that it doesn't simplify the story by pinning all the blame on Trump. The full extent of the CDC's disastrous bungling of early testing is laid bare, as is the inter-agency feuding, and the mistakes made at the state level.

But in the end one is left with a feeling of revulsion at the way Trump went from insouciance to idiocy to malevolence: deliberately making matters worse. I defy anyone to read this piece and not be disgusted by his pathologically solipsistic conduct.